Life & Wisdom Quote by Raymond Duncan

A good talk, Duncan implies, is an act of compression: the speaker does the hard labor so the audience doesn’t have to. The line lands because it flips a common vanity of public speaking. We like to imagine that difficulty equals depth, that sprawling abstraction is somehow more “serious.” Duncan calls that bluff. If you can’t boil it down, you’re not just failing at style; you’re outsourcing your own thinking.

The craft here is bodily and unfair. “Boil it down” evokes the kitchen: time, heat, reduction, patience. “Sweat it out” drags us into the audience’s seat, stuck in someone else’s humidity. It’s a small, sharp moral economy: who pays for the clarity? In Duncan’s formulation, the ethical speaker absorbs the cost up front; the lazy or self-indulgent one charges it to everyone else.

Context matters. Duncan lived in an era of manifestos, salons, lecture culture, and modernism’s love affair with difficulty. He was also a figure adjacent to arts-and-crafts idealism, where making something well meant respecting the materials and the user. That sensibility shows up here as a demand for honest workmanship in language. The subtext is anti-performative: don’t mistake the performance of intelligence for intelligence itself. Clarity isn’t simplification for the masses; it’s proof of mastery, and a courtesy.